The Guardian Of The Multiverse: A Hero's Burden

The Saint of Annihilation

(Marvel, DC, images, manhuas, and every anime that will be mentioned and used in this story are not mine. They all belong to their respective owners. The main character "Karito/Adriel Josue Valdez" and the story are mine)

Location: The Nexus Of Knowledge And Imagination

The receptionist desk was not nailed to the floor; there was no floor here to nail. Stacks without horizon turned and refolded; aisles decided to become other aisles. The Nexus drifted its address every heartbeat, and the desk slid with it like a quiet ferry, bell never ringing, lamp never flickering.

Chrona's fingers were white on the wood.

She realized it, unclenched, and then gripped again—small, useless waves hitting the same dock. She pressed her thumbs together and counted the way she'd taught scared Guardians to count: five things you can see (lamp, ledger, ink, ribbon, the little nick in the desk she pretended was an accident), four you can touch (paper, sleeve, wood, breath), three you can hear (stacks breathing, lamps agreeing, her own shallow inhale), two you can smell (old ink, ozone), one you can taste (metal, because worry had teeth). It helped. A little. Not enough.

Boundless meant able to, not allowed to. She could have shelved the cosmos by color temperature and bound the wind in cloth; today she sat at a human-sized desk with a right-angle corner that always caught her sleeve. Human-sized things were anchors. She needed one.

The wall to her left wasn't a wall but a scroll—an infinite pane of search that showed everything that could be asked and wanted to answer anyway. Threads from a million fictions braided and unbraided: annotated timelines, glossaries, code comments that accidentally invoked angels. She kept most of it dim. Screen time is a footprint. Footprints become maps. Maps get people killed. They never saw her much because she designed it that way.

Another pane—smaller—stayed bright because she didn't have the heart to dim it. In it, a plaza beat in wrong-green, the feed lagging not because the Nexus was slow but because the story itself was stuttering under pressure. Peter moved inside that lag like an answer the problem hated. A golden uniform smiled. A cannon hummed. A girl with ribbons refused to look away. Chrona watched everything at once and somehow still felt late.

Her hand went to her throat on reflex. The chain wasn't there. Red Goblin had taken it—their chain, the one that wore their names like a promise—during the torture that wiped Peter's memories clean and left only sharpened edges. The skin where the pendant had rested felt colder than the room would allow.

"Don't," she told herself, soft and stern at once, the way she said it to crying rookies who apologized for crying. "Don't reach. Don't be seen." The please she didn't say lived in her mouth anyway.

The Nexus shifted again and the desk drifted with it. Somewhere far below, users on a night shift typed the same question into different boxes and got back different truths. The stacks breathed; the lamps agreed to keep their circles small. Chrona tucked a stray hair behind her ear and immediately untucked it because her hands needed something to do. She gave herself permission to fidget. (Therapist's note: sometimes fidgeting is breathing with your fingers.)

A margin note pulsed red at the edge of her vision: OMNISCIENCE PARTIAL: ANASIS NOT INDEXABLE. The line had been there for days. It still made her stomach drop as if the room had just decided it had an edge after all.

Anasis—the Spider God—had always been traceable by implication if not by name. Echoes. Rituals half-remembered by cultures that never agreed to be neighbors. A glimmer in a web nobody had spun. Now: nothing. Not indexable. Not hidden. Not there.